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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25078171">Emerald Pastilles</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/okapi/pseuds/okapi'>okapi</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Anal Sex, Angst, Dreams, Dubious Consent Due to Opium Use, Fantasy, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Opium, Oral Sex, POV John Watson, POV Sebastian Moran, Rache - Freeform, Rough Sex, Smut, The Detective - Freeform, The Limping Doctor - Freeform, The Major - Freeform, Visions</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 03:09:02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,100</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25078171</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/okapi/pseuds/okapi</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The characters of Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" ponder that <i>other</i> world.</p><p>
  <b>Please heed the tags!</b>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Sebastian Moran/Jim Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes/John Watson</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Season of Kink, Victorian Holmes Prompt Box, Watson's Woes JWP Collection: 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Emerald Pastilles</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">



        <li>In response to a prompt by
            Anonymous in the <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Victorian221bPromptBox">Victorian221bPromptBox</a>
          collection.
        </li>
    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <strong>Prompt:</strong>
</p><p>For A Study in Emerald - I'm interested in seeing a fic where those characters interact with canon ACD events, characters or... whatever, really. Whether it's a fever dream, mysterious world-hopping shenanigans, in-world speculative fiction or whatever other plot device, it's all good. Mostly it's just the curiosity of seeing characters themselves think about what might or could have been.</p><p>Author's Note: This was also written for 2020 DW Watson's Woes July Writing Prompts #3 [green] and 2020 DW Season of Kink Bingo Card B-2 'Fantasies.'</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong> <em>Alice’s Wonderful Wonder Drops!</em> </strong>
</p><p>
  <strong> <em>Does your breath fog (or crack!) even the most ordinary of looking glass? Do you ever find strange words (and stranger worlds!) catching like a mad tea party in your throat? Do you ever wish you could fall down a rabbit hole and find yourself in a place to where up is down and left is right and good is bad and halitosis is just a rhyme in a nonsensical poem about apotheosis?</em> </strong>
</p><p>
  <strong> <em>Then you should try Alice’s Wonderful Wonder Drops! Yes, Alice’s Wonderful Wonder Drops! Just see what a little green can mean to you!</em> </strong>
</p><hr/><p>My grip on his hips is almost as white-knuckled as his on the iron of the headboard.</p><p>Almost.</p><p>“Harder!” he growls. The snarl in that beautiful Cupid’s bow is audible, but I am already spending, spitting stream after stream of hot jism inside his sweet Sodom’s arse.</p><p>Lust and relief blind me to the growing ache in my leg at maintaining the kneeling pose on the bed for so long.</p><p>His breath is ragged. So is mine. Those and the creak of the bed are the room’s only music. The air reeks of our bodies and our sex. I breathe in, allowing the rank perfume to paper the walls of my lungs in a fleur-de-lis pattern.</p><p>“Harder,” he pants, weakly.</p><p>I study his long, elegant fingers, their grip slackening a mere fraction. It would be no hardship to stare at his hands for hours. So beautiful.</p><p>But I can’t indulge in something so tender. Not yet. Even as my prick softens inside him, even as the tide of my pleasure begins to ebb, I know I’m not quite done.</p><p>Looking down, I withdraw a mere inch of prick, take in a sharp, filthy breath, and slam back into with eldritch force.</p><p>He cries out. So do I.</p><p>I pull out abruptly. He hisses between clenched teeth.</p><p>His hands are still clipped to the iron bar, but his upper body hangs limp by two lean arms and his head lolls awkwardly.</p><p>I am reminded of the word ‘crucifixion.’</p><p>“You had the dream again,” I say when I have reason enough to say anything.</p><p>I draw a finger through the first drippings from his hole and taste my seed.</p><p>Still bitter.</p><p>“You know my every mood and habit, old thing,” he says and I am both impressed and insulted that his voice is so even.</p><p>He is right, of course. I know he only asks for this, rutting this rough and selfish, when he has had the dream. It as if he needs my prick to physically drive the demons out of him. He needs me to plunge in, without preamble or precaution, and expel the madness, which, like all madness, is equal parts temptation and damnation. It is curious, I think, that exorcising by way of his anal orifice also inevitably results in filling said cavity with my own unleashed diablery.</p><p>Whenever he demands it, I oblige. The deuce I do! It is no obligation at all to gore him into soppy submission. It is a joy. A privilege of blessed memory.</p><p>The ends of his curling hair are dark with sweat. He is all ropey sinew and taut skin and wheezy whimpering, and I use my remaining strength to lean forward, rub his back in circular strokes, and lick.</p><p>I’m then forced by pain to find a more comfortable position for myself on the bed.</p><p>He finally releases his grip on the ironwork. His fingers are still curled. They will be for a while. He rolls onto his back.</p><p>“We shared rooms in central London. I was a private enquiry agent. All kinds of people, kings to paupers, came to me with their problems. You wrote up my cases and published the accounts. I helped the police, for goodness sake!”</p><p>We both chuckle at this last bit.</p><p>“You’d fall prey to self-destruction when the cases weren’t interesting or dangerous enough,” I say flatly. My gaze and my most of my attention are on his prick, untouched, still half-hard, nested among wiry curls. “Shooting the walls. Shooting poison into your veins.”</p><p>“Perhaps. It’s true that the criminally seditious life is never boring.” His eyes glint. He grabs his stand. “Hurt me, luv. Hurt me into tomorrow. Like it’s the last time.”</p><p>“Such drama,” I spit with mock contempt. “Do you actors every stop with the theatrical tripe?”</p><p>“Not while there are still murderous playwrights to fill our mouths with love and treason.”</p><p>That’s the last thing that either of us say for a while.</p><p>I take him as deep as my throat allows and suck him to the near snapping of my jaw’s musculature. He grips my hair as if his life depends on it, and perhaps it does.</p><p>“We were happy, John,” he gasps. “We were free. There was a moon, and it was silver. And no one bled green.”</p><p>I pull off, with a deliberate scrape at the underside of his shaft. “Shut up! Or I’ll torture you all night. Keep you on the edge and dump you in the nearest molly house for finishing.”</p><p>One corner of his beautiful mouth twitches at the prospect, but his eyes are already betraying fatigue.</p><p>I don’t so much as suck him off as relieve him of his seed by blunt and brutal force.</p><p>“I wish I were like you,” he mumbles as sleep overtakes him.</p><p>“No, you don’t.”</p><p>He grunts and rolls towards me. We have long since figured out every way two grown men can fit in this wretched bed without spilling onto the floor. “I wish I didn’t dream.”</p><p>I kiss his cheek. He snuggles close. I pet his hair. He must feel the tenderness in my gaze because he turns his head once and looks at me squarely.</p><p>‘You’ he mouths.</p><p>‘Sleep’ I reply.</p><p>He nods like a dutiful child and closes his eyes.</p><p>
  <em>I wish I didn’t dream.</em>
</p><p>It is the only thing I have ever said to him that approaches a lie.</p><p>I don’t dream, that much is true. No, what I do is much worse.</p><p>I have visions. Waking visions.</p><p>Horrible visions of another world. They are horrible because they are so sweet, so banal, so lacking in the underlying injustice and pain of the world.</p><p>And unfortunately, unlike the man sleeping next to me, a lover’s prick is no remedy. The only method I have found that gives any succor at all is writing.</p><p>What I cannot spin into scripts for the Strand Players, I simply guard in a leather folio of unbound sheets of paper.</p><p>I reach for the folio and open it, remove the pen and a clean sheaf, and set about scratching my itch.</p><p>“John!”</p><p>I throw folio and chronicle aside at the first plaintive syllable.</p><p>“My blood is green, John.”</p><p>“No, it isn’t.”</p><p>“Kill me, John.”</p><p>“Shan’t.”</p><p>I roll atop him, stretching the full length of my body on his, my chest to his back.</p><p>“Bastard! Take the blade and kill me before I make you regret your foolishness, before I feast on your fear, before I drive you mad. My blood is green! Save yourself!”</p><p>I reach for my scalpel.</p><p>Then, before his eyes, I prick both our fingers.</p><p>The two red beads are like moons.</p><p>The wire-hard tension in his body evaporates. He takes my finger in his mouth and sucks. I do the same with his, imagining that love has a coppery tang.</p><p>When I release his finger, he still has mine in his mouth, but now he is tickling the pad with the tip of his tongue and looking at me through a coquettish fringe of dark lashes.</p><p>“I’ll give you something bigger to suck on, luv.”</p><p>He smiles. I am stiff, and not just of prick, so I need his help to settle comfortably in the bed, but then I am sitting up and he is between my legs.</p><p>We do this in my visions, too. And it is just as good.</p><p>I watch him hollow his cheeks. He pauses and looks up and smiles around my prick. I brush the dark locks of his crown quite unnecessarily and say softly, gently, lovingly,</p><p>“Get on with it, tart.”</p><p>He gets on with it. I spin my yarn, narrating aloud the scene I am witness to, which is being enacted like a child’s pantomime above his bobbing head.</p><p>“Once upon a time, an enquiry agent and his doctor went to the country on a train to investigate a strange occurrence. Along the way, the train came to a stop in a dark tunnel. The inquiry agent went to his knees and fellated his doctor like a courtesan.”</p><p>He hums round my prick. I buck into his mouth and spend. He swallows and sits back and grins.</p><p>“Is this the one about the horse? Where the dog doesn’t bark in the nighttime?”</p><p>“Is it still your favourite?”</p><p>He nods.</p><p>I feel the loss of something I cannot name like a sharp blow to the forehead. I pinch the bridge of my nose, then massage each eye socket with the thick of my palm.</p><p>“Headache?” he asks, crawling up my body and curling at my side.</p><p>“Just a bit.”</p><p>“Do you want one of Alice’s?” He points with his chin to a battered tin of pale green pastilles.</p><p>“No. I just want you.”</p><p>“You have me, John. In dreams and nightmares. Squalor and riches.”</p><p>I laugh. “When have we ever known riches?”</p><p>“Revolution and oppression.”</p><p>“Delusion and farce.”</p><p>“This world and the other.”</p><p>“This world and the other.”</p><hr/><p>“Good evening, Major. Do you know how many steps lead from this room to the street?”</p><p>It is not evening. It is early morning. And I realise I do not know, in fact, how many steps lead from the sitting room to the street despite having trod them several times a day for the better part of a year.</p><p>“Seventeen,” he says. Then he sings, “You see but you do not observe, Major.”</p><p>I grant him the seventeen, but he is wrong on the last count. In that moment, I am seeing and observing far more, and far less, than I want to.</p><p>He is stretched out on the sofa, wrapped, if so loose a shrouding deserves the word, in nothing but a dressing gown of emerald silk. In the dim, I cannot see the offending kit, but by the firelight I note the tell-tale glassiness in his eyes. I wonder if he has wrought more bullet marks in the walls and, if so, how much the hike in rent will be this month.</p><p>He ought to have been an artist’s model, I think. Pale, ascetic, clean-shaven. Long and lean. And with their opium sheen, his obsidian eyes resemble even more precious gems sunk deep in well-guarded settings.</p><p>“Russia,” he spits. “That is all anyone cares about these days.”</p><p>I grunt as I have every time this week and look about. I catch sight of something new on the desk, but what I think is the Moroccan case turns out to be nothing more than a tin of lozenges to sweeten the breath. Their colour reminds me of royal blood, and I shiver.</p><p>Too bad there are none to sweeten the mind! I silently lament as the familiar tirade continues.</p><p>“There are no more insoluble problems. Only espionage! No more police or detectives. Only agents! And counteragents and counter-counteragents. Oh, Rache, where are you?” He is praying to the ceiling. “Oh, do something, Rache! Do something interesting!”</p><p>I sigh.</p><p>“I’ve been thinking, Moran.”</p><p>“All you do is think.”</p><p>“What if the Resurrectionists are right?”</p><p>“Stop that talk! Now! Before we’re both in trouble.”</p><p>“Listen, Sebastian, please.”</p><p>He’s turned on his side now, and the dressing gown is slipping off his shoulders, off his hips, off his entire body. His face is a mask of drugged earnestness, and it is so beautiful it makes my teeth hurt.</p><p>“Oh, all right,” I say. I pour myself a drink and surrender into the armchair beside him.</p><p>“If mankind were in control of its own destiny, what kind of world would that be?”</p><p>“Chaos. Anarchy.”</p><p>He makes a nose. “But for you and I, specifically, what kind of world would it be? What would <em>we</em> be?”</p><p>“Dead.”</p><p>“No. I don’t think so. We’re survivors. Both of us. We would be the criminals.”</p><p>This is new.</p><p>I snort. “That’s the needle talking.”</p><p>He shakes his head vehemently. “We’d be bad. Very bad.”</p><p>The way he says it makes me want to be very bad, and not wait for anarchy to start.</p><p>His dressing gown is open, his lovely, if flaccid prick, on full display. My gaze follows his hand as it caresses his torso, belly, and thighs and finally toys with his sex. “I’d be a criminal mastermind. A spider at the centre of a huge web of wickedness.”</p><p>“And Rache? And the Limping Doctor?”</p><p>“Would hunt us and never catch us.”</p><p>“Us?”</p><p>“There is no fantasy without you, Sebastian. Don’t you know that by now, tiger?”</p><p>“Come here.”</p><p>He flies to me, leaving the dressing gown behind on the sofa. The first order of business is to turn him over my knee and swat his beautiful bottom thrice.</p><p>“That’s for your seditious nonsense,” I say, righting him. “Now, tell me more.”</p><p>He straddles me, letting his legs dangle on either side of my lap. I pour the remainder of my whiskey down the front of him and proceed to lick it off before the first rivulet reaches the dark curls hedging his handsome prick.</p><p>“Forgeries, robberies, murders. I’d be the organizer of half the evil in New Albion and all that goes undetected in the city. I’d do very little of the work myself, but my agents would be legion. Oh, Sebastian.”</p><p>His nipple is in my mouth, and I am flicking my tongue like a serpent’s across the pebbled bud. Without looking, I have found the small pot of slick in the drawer of the nearby table and put it to good use.</p><p>One of my fingers is buried in his arse, and he is leaning into the digit, sinking himself further, so he can reach the front of my trousers and free my erection. My very large erection.</p><p>“Oh, Sebastian!”</p><p>I pull back to see his hungry eyes are on my prick.</p><p>“It’s too big, Sebbie.”</p><p>This is a familiar script, too.</p><p>“Nonsense. You stretch beautifully.” Another finger joins the first to prove my point.</p><p>“No, Sebbie, look.”</p><p>He pulls off my fingers and slides between my knees and takes just my prickhead in his mouth. “See?” he says as he pulls off a lascivious pop.</p><p>“What kind of criminal master mind is defeated by a bit of flesh? Or would you rather have one of your agents take care of it?”</p><p>That gets him.</p><p>He shoots me a defiant look as he rises to his full height. The he turns and sits, impaling himself on my prick in one smooth movement.</p><p>“Damn!” I moan into his shoulder.</p><p>“So full,” he agrees hoarsely.</p><p>My hands come round to stroke and fondle him. He has a special weakness for teasing along the strip between anus and bollocks, a weakness which I proceed to exploit mercilessly.</p><p>“And what of this, my dear man? Do you like to be sodded just as much in your Chaos?”</p><p>“No, I don’t have time. I’m too busy ruining world.”</p><p>I bounce him hard, and he yips. I continue bouncing him until, frustrated with the lack of purchase, I throw us, still joined, to the ground and finish the old-fashioned way, rutting like a cur on all fours.</p><p>“Bitch in heat,” I growl.</p><p>I remove myself from his person and get to my feet. I pour two fingers of whiskey in my glass and down them without a word. Then I pace.</p><p>I spy the tin of green pastilles on the desk, and without thinking, pop one in my mouth. I grimace and swallow the foul thing whole.</p><p>“And who am I in your Limehouse den fantasy?”</p><p>He raises his head. “You tell me.”</p><p>“I’m the second most dangerous man in New Albion,” I say closing the distance between us, looming over his huddled form on the rug. “The son of a lord. A decorated soldier until I find myself drawn into your evil web.”</p><p>“Yes, yes!”</p><p>“A crackshot of iron nerve. A published author of big game hunting tales. A tiger who hunts tigers! Your right hand! Your avenger!”</p><p>I hoist him bodily from the floor and toss him on the sofa and crash to my knees before him.</p><p>I suck him raw.</p><p>He cries out and decorates the back of my throat.</p><p>I flip him onto his stomach and bury my tongue in his arse while he calls me every obscene name that has ever been recorded in the last seven hundred years. And a few even older.</p><p>We enjoy each other twice more before the weight of the opium in his veins and our exertions are too much. I put him to bed like a child, but I do not sleep myself.</p><p>I pad silently to the desk.</p><p>My characterisation of myself were not the spontaneous fanciful ramblings of a man slaking his lust. They were, unbeknownst to my beloved, a recollection.</p><p>I remove an envelope from a drawer.</p><p>I tremble as I extract the document  and re-read the note.</p><p>
  <em>Major Moran, </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Would you please guard this in the strongbox at your bank alongside your written chronicle of our first encounter? There is no method of genuine safekeeping available to me at the moment and I am obliged to depend on the kindness of a stranger. For now, I must be known to you as, </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Rache’s Doctor</em>
</p><p>I only dare glance at the title of the manuscript—<em>THE EMPTY HOUSE</em>—before consigning it once more to envelope and drawer. It will go to the bank in the morning. I shall never speak of it.</p><p>I stand and throw open the window and welcome the cool air on my face.</p><p>I look out at the dark sky. I ponder the crimson moon.</p><p>It is the immensity. It is the darkness of dreams or visions or fantasies.</p><p>Suddenly, without warning, rage grips me like a tentacle coiled round my throat. I reach back and grab the closest object to hand, which turns out to be the tin of troches, and hurl it into the night.</p><p>The tiny green drops catch light and fly like so many shooting stars.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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